Bill Clinton spent his time in the White House working with Republicans to champion trade, telecommunications and financial deregulation – destructive policies specifically crafted to boost corporate profits at the expense of ordinary workers.

Reminds me of the time when the Left Front government in West Bengal tried to ban computers on the grounds they would hurt workers.

Sometimes it is fun to read lefty opeds and wonder how they got there.

After landing in Columbus, the [Hillary Clinton] campaign entourage headed by motorcade to Zanesville, a town of about twenty-five thousand, sixty miles away, for what was billed as an economic “summit.” When one speaker offered encomiums to Clinton rather than economic prescriptions, she gently reprimanded her, saying, “We’re going to put a moratorium on compliments.” Then, with the bonhomie of a high-school health teacher, she turned the conversation back toward government programs to help people “quit smoking, to get more exercise, to eat right, to take their vitamins.”

– New Yorker, March 17, 2008

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

– Michelle Obama speech in UCLA, February 3, 2008.

[John McCain] recently proposed legislation requiring every registered sex offender in the country to report all their active email accounts to law enforcement or face prison. He wants to federalize the oversight of professional boxing. He wants yet more vigor in fighting the War on Meth. He has lauded Teddy Roosevelt’s fight against the “unrestricted individualism” of the businessman who “injures the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit.”
[John McCain] has long agitated for mandatory national service.
McCain’s attitude toward individuals who choose paths he deems inappropriate is somewhere between inflexible and hostile. “In the Roosevelt code, the authentic meaning of freedom gave equal respect to serf-interest and common purpose, to rights and duties,” McCain writes. “And it absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake…. “

– Reason, April 2007.

H/T to Radley Balko at Reason for the first two excerpts. His response to them mirrors my sentiments:

The exit polls have been pretty off the mark this election season but in a consistent manner. As Brendan Loy notes in this post, the polls have been typically off by 7-8 points in Obama’s direction. This pattern was repeated yesterday — Clinton won Pennsylvania by 9 points when the CNN exit polls earlier in the day predicted she should win by 2.

I guess this is due to a combination of two factors.

1) The pollsters are clueless about weighted sampling and ignorant about the demographics of this contest (or more likely, simply too lazy to implement them): Obama does much better among the young, the affluent, the urban and the educated. A polling strategy that picks up a disproportionate number of such individuals, as would happen, for instance, if the pollsters spent most of their time in the big cities or other easily accessible parts of a state, is bound to go wrong.

2) People are not truthful when asked who they voted for: It may be true that a lot of whites vote for Clinton, then lie that they voted for Obama (so as to not appear racist?)

The Washington Post has a fine article about Samantha Power, the top Obama aide who was forced to resign after a Scot newspaper published her ‘off-the-record’ remark that Hillary Clinton was acting like a ‘monster’ and ‘stooping to anything’.

How does a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author manage to blow up her brief political consulting career over the use of the phrase “off the record”?
Samantha Power resigned as a foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama yesterday, hours after the Scotsman newspaper quoted her as making a disparaging remark about Hillary Clinton — although, immediately after uttering the comment, she asked the reporter not to use it. As the story recounted:

” ‘She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,’ Ms. Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.”

Read the whole article for a wonderful profile of Power, a brilliant academic who was also once called the world’s most beautiful woman by Vogue magazine and whose life changed forever when the words “It’s Obama, call me” showed up on her cellphone one day.

It is unlikely Samantha Power will be asked to play a role as a political advisor by anyone again. It is even more unlikely that Clinton’s spokesperson Howard Wolfson will resign for comparing Obama to Kenneth Starr earlier this week. Such is politics.